I just watched a documentary called “Cropsey”. The name is in reference to a general Boogeyman that parents used to tell their children about, to scare them into not staying out late or wandering into abandoned buildings. The documentary was about two hours long, and it attempted to cover a lot of material. So, I have questions about some of the gaps, but I assume that the gaps are glossed over for the sake of time in the documentary.
The documentary covers Staten Island in New York state. If you look at a map of the greater New York city area, and the five boroughs, it’s a maze of land masses and waterways. Apparently, until after the WWII boom, Staten Island was an ignored land mass. It was pristine, but it was also a dumping ground. The other four boroughs literally used Staten Island as a landfill. It was also used to dump other things that people would want to never be found. So, it had a reputation.
But, development happened, and neighborhoods popped up. What also popped up was the Willowbrook hospital. At least the way it was shown in the documentary, it is the role model evil hospital of all the evil hospitals you have ever seen in any horror movie that featured an evil hospital. It covered hundreds of acres, and was divided into sections. One section was referred to as The Farm, where they kept tuberculosis patients, much in the same way lepers were exiled away to their own colonies.
But, the main part of the hospital was a mental institution. And it operated through the 60s, 70s, and 80s. It housed thousands of mentally deficient patients in horrible conditions, with a staff that was not supported enough to handle the conditions. In the early 70s, one of the employees reached out to a then unknown reporter named Geraldo Rivera, to do an expose on the hospital. Apparently, doors were left unlocked, and there was no security, so Geraldo walked right in with a camera crew and documented the deplorable conditions of the hospital. It took New York state another 15 years to finally close the hospital.
You would think that was the happy ending, but apparently, that was only the beginning. This is because, once the hospital was closed, I assume that some of the patients were transferred to other hospitals. And those patients that had loving families that could support them went home to their families. But those that didn’t have families and were not transferred were pretty much just abandoned. The hospital was also not demolished, it remained there, so it was speculated that - either out of no where else to go or habit - a lot of the patients remained on the empty grounds of the hospital.
That’s about the time that children started disappearing from the neighborhoods of Staten Island. Some numbers of children were stated, but I don’t know how those numbers stack up against national numbers, or per capita - not that that matters much, since we are talking about missing children. A majority of these children were mentally handicapped themselves, so not much attention was paid to their disappearances.
Until Jennifer Schweiger, a young girl with Down syndrome, went missing while taking a walk in public. A massive search was initiated, and her body was found a month later in a shallow grave, on the grounds of the closed Willowbrook hospital.
It did not take long to zero in on a suspect, Andre Rand. Andre was deemed to lack mental capacity himself, but was also labeled as a manipulator. He worked menial jobs around Staten Island, but was also at one time an employee at the Willowbrook hospital. He was found to have been in the area around the time of a lot of these abductions of these children, and was seen talking to a lot of them shortly before they went missing. He also was someone who lived on the grounds of the closed Willowbrook hospital.
He was arrested and charged with kidnapping and murder, but was only convicted of the kidnapping. He spent almost 20 years in jail, before being convicted of the kidnapping of one of the other missing children from the 70s, and is now serving a 30 year sentence. Almost all of the evidence was circumstantial.
I only vaguely knew of this case, and only because Geraldo Rivera was involved with it. It wasn’t until I saw this documentary that I heard much more of the story.
I was wondering, we have to have people here on this board who lived on Staten Island during this time, or psychologists who heard of the demise of this hospital, or law enforcement people who studied this case, or journalists that researched this case. I was wondering if anyone here can fill in some of the gaps, or give personal experiences, or professional revelations about this whole issue.